A column in Guardian Public the freebie mag for people who buy things for the public sector (you thought The Guardian was publishing this out of public duty – naïve old you; it hopes to get through to people who spend money on advertising) contains a puff by a Futurebuilders man for their work. This is the organisation that provides up-front funding to help voluntary organisations bid for public contracts.

True to the principle of making the readership of a magazine (in this case commissioners of public services) feel good, the author writes encouragingly that it seems that the distinctiveness of the voluntary sector is going to come from intelligent commissioning. This means cleverness from all those people who set up contracts with voluntary bodies.

No Jonathan, the whole point about the voluntary sector is that it decides what it wants to do and how to do it, and people go and work in it because they have freedom to be creative about things (or, to be brutally accurate, also to get stuck in the past and do things like people did them a hundred years ago provided there’s an endowment). The results are distinctive because they don’t have to fit into any pattern, while on the other hand most commissioning is about complying with government guidelines. E.g, the St Christopher’s contract with its local PCTs, which is an excellent piece of professional work on their part and produced through an exemplary process of communication and collaboration, but actually requires the Hospice to comply with the NICE Guidelines on palliative care.

Let’s stick with the idea that intelligent commissioners, like the people who commission St Christopher’s, look for something good and interesting and then commission it; they don’t create soimething distinctive themselves and then go out and get some cheap organisation to do it their way.

Lewis, J. (2008) The future is bright for the third sector. Public October: 42-3.